I found this a deeply pseudo-intellectual book, a kind of failed version of Barthes' A Lover's Discourse with photos, email transcripts, wedding albums and demented letters to Facebook appended and interspersed with the text. The idea has potential: the exposure of the psychopathology of erotic love - but this veers between the silly (the cutesy little drawings of exactly where XX sits in the office in relation to MS), the mad (the photos of all the cigarette lighters MS has stolen from the object of her desire), and the plain weird (photos of Ladurée macarons, a broken umbrella...). This is trying oh so hard to be deep and postmodern and ends up just being feeble.

If you’re a die hard chick lit fan then this is a cutesy, cup-cakey read, all custard doughnuts, praline brioches and fluffy females. To be honest I found the whole thing long-winded and tedious: over 450 pages of absurd situations, emails with embarrassing subject headers (‘Grrrr’, ‘herbs the word’, ‘!’), and the kind of dialogue that no-one outside of chick-lit novels and B list rom-coms actually speaks. I enjoy a frothy read now and then but this is way too coy and cloying for me.

Heiny writes well enough but there's really nothing original here: part Sex and the City (again), part Bridget Jones (again), part every other discontented singleton/wife/mother you've ever read: women struggle to date, struggle to love and be loved, struggle to stay married... The stories are set mostly in New York with the usual hip, urban angst - all very amiable but there's nothing here I haven't read or seen before. And most of the tales are just slice-of-life scenes with no denouement or resolution. This is easy commuter reading but the stories all merge into one another after a while - and I certainly never laughed out loud... beware the publishers' hype.

Given Hughes' notorious reluctance to speak about his volatile marriage to Sylvia Plath, this collection came as a shock when it appeared. Comprising poems written since Plath's suicide in 1963 this is both intimate and a public dialogue, a way of speaking back to Plath, her poems, and also the world which sometimes turned Hughes into a patriarchal monster of a husband.

The best of the poems draw on Plath's own works, re-using her texts, titles, imagery and language to offer Hughes' side of the story: Setebos, and Night-ride on Ariel are both particularly vindicatory, blaming everyone else from Plath's mother, to her college patron and even her psychiatrists for her ultimate fate - notably all female. And Freedom of Speech is a macabre and bitter vision of Plath's 60th birthday party.

These feel more cathartic than anything else and the deliberate comparisons they draw with Plath's own work, especially the Ariel collection, serve to highlight the brilliance of Plath even at her most vitriolic and self-destructive. So these may not be the best of Hughes' poetry, but as one side of a contentious and ongoing poetic and personal dialogue these are indispensable.

Given Hughes' notorious reluctance to speak about his volatile marriage to Sylvia Plath, this collection came as a shock when it appeared. Comprising poems written since Plath's suicide in 1963 this is both intimate and a public dialogue, a way of speaking back to Plath, her poems, and also the world which sometimes turned Hughes into a patriarchal monster of a husband.

The best of the poems draw on Plath's own works, re-using her texts, titles, imagery and language to offer Hughes' side of the story: Setebos, and Night-ride on Ariel are both particularly vindicatory, blaming everyone else from Plath's mother, to her college patron and even her psychiatrists for her ultimate fate - notably all female. And Freedom of Speech is a macabre and bitter vision of Plath's 60th birthday party.

These feel more cathartic than anything else and the deliberate comparisons they draw with Plath's own work, especially the Ariel collection, serve to highlight the brilliance of Plath even at her most vitriolic and self-destructive. So these may not be the best of Hughes' poetry, but as one side of a contentious and ongoing poetic and personal dialogue these are indispensable.

One of the more sophisticated generation of Plath scholars who question both the 'confessional' nature of her poetry and her feminine victimhood, Bronfen gives a concise yet stimulating account of Plath's life, work and the critical approaches we can take to reading her. Her introductory chapter is excellent at siting Plath and gives an overview of some of the controversies, debates and even impasses that still accrue to the women, the writer and her work.

Chapters are organised by works (the poetry, the fictional prose, the journals and letters etc.) and there's a good summary on theorising Plath (psychoanalytical, feminist, socio-historical etc.) as well as a section on reception. Given the size limitations this is brisk in terms of detailed textual readings but does give an excellent overview of the more or less current (2004) state of field - recommended for students and general readers wanting a way in to this most complex of poets.

The problem with this dual device is that it performs both functions well, but neither brilliantly. The interchangeable head means that it can be used as an epilator and as a facial cleansing brush.

The epilator head is small but it is recommended that you don't use it under your brow line, surely the place it would be most useful? It's fine to clean up those pesky hairs surrounding your eyebrows but is still too unwieldy to do your brow arch so it doesn't replace plucking or threading to keep your brows neat. I found it painless, and suspect that if you've been plucking your eyebrows for years anyway then this won't hurt at all.

As a facial cleansing brush this is definitely a poor relation to the Philips Visapure: the brush drags rather than glides, rotates only rather than also vibrating and the bristles are much shorter making them feel harsher on my skin. I use the Philips brush every morning but would hesitate to use this more than a couple of times a week as an exfoliator (and I have normal skin which rarely reacts).

This is significantly smaller than the Philips face brush and takes an AA battery rather than being rechargeable so will be useful for travelling - though for home use it feels a little old-fashioned to be replacing a battery. The package comes with a cheap-looking lilac bag to hold everything, a handy lighted magnifying mirror and the usual brush to keep the epilator head clean.

If you suffer from serious facial hair then this may well be brilliant but if you want something to keep your eyebrows neat and shaped then this does half the job but won't replace your tweezers - 4-stars.

These are very good quality pinking shears but note that they are designed for fabric only rather than for paper crafting purposes. The blades were a little stiff when I first got them but have loosened with use. The handles are plastic, mine a two-tone purple and pink which doesn't show up well on the photo, and feel nice in the hand.

Designed for jewellery makers, these are also perfect if you're forever inexplicably finding earrings without their backs... these are standard design and size, silver plated, fit my earring posts snugly and haven't irritated my skin - with 300 backs in the pack these will keep even terminal earring losers happy. I received a sample for review purposes and am very happy to recommend these.

I love the Charlie Fox series and while this is the second book to feature Charlie, it's the first real book of the series featuring the troubled relationship between Charlie herself and her ex-lover Sean Meyer. Ex-Special Forces trainee, Charlie is a brilliant mix of toughness and vulnerability, but not at all in a typical or expected way. Here she is house-sitting for a friend in Lancaster when she gets drawn into urban violence on a run-down estate - only there's far more going on here than meets the eye.

I have to say that I prefer the later books where Charlie is a bodyguard. But even here, Sharp shows herself an astute story-teller, especially good at characterisation, and twisted, brutal plots. These aren't books that are gory in a serial-killer way, but they certainly don't shy away from violence, bloodshed and death.

Despite that, the heart of these books are Charlie herself and her tense and tormented relationship with the enigmatic and utterly compelling Sean Meyer. In this book we see something of Sean's home and family life, something which Sharp abandons in the series, making it all the more riveting and revealing here.

There are points at which we can feel Sharp learning her craft - but the upside is, the later books just keep getting better.